They’re here! They’re invading your cubicles and boardrooms! Their numbers are growing! They’re the Millennial generation, and they’re going to ruin you with their insatiable hunger for — using their personal mobile device for work! IT departments everywhere will be powerless!

Not so fast. As with any spooky tale, there is a way to stop the bogeyman. In this case, the silver bullet is a strong, updated bring your own device (BYOD) policy.

The thing is (as some IT leaders and analysts will tell you) when it comes to BYOD, these new-generation workers are really no different from their fellow employees and, indeed, employers. To paint their presence as a cause for concern makes them sound like impudent children. Are they any different from your CEO who insists on using her new iPad, or from the head of marketing who’s more comfortable with his ‘Droid than the company-issued BlackBerry?

It’s not a generational thing, it’s a societal thing. It’s the consumerization of IT — and that’s not about to change, so policies will have to: Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at San Francisco-based Lopez Research, has been sounding this particular alarm for more than a year.

“It started with senior management bringing in their own devices; now people are starting to realize it’s a big phenomenon,” Lopez said. “The new workforce is very accustomed to being tooled in their own environment; and what’s happened is, if you haven’t changed your policies, you could be losing out on a certain type of talent. … IT managers are saying, ‘We have to find a way to deal with this.’”

Those IT managers include Josh MacNeil, assistant director of technology services at the Whitman Hanson Regional School District in Massachusetts. He is very much in favor of letting people work in ways that allow them to be most productive. For the past 10 years, his district has allowed teachers 24/7 remote access. But dealing with devices will be a true challenge, he admits. He is creating a BYOD policy, gathering information from other school districts. The information exchange on the topic of BYOD has picked up pace noticeably in just the past couple of months, he said.

For organizations ready to take on the challenge of creating a policy, or working on updating their BYOD policy, Lopez Research suggests addressing 10 (seemingly) simple questions:

• Who is eligible? What type of employees can access the company’s network?
• What data and services can be accessed?
• How will applications and services be delivered?
• What does the company pay for?
• Which operating systems and devices, and how many platforms will IT support?
• How is the device secured?
• How is the device managed? Will it be maintained over the air or through syncing with a desktop or Web application?
• What support is provided?
• What are the privacy issues?
• What are the legal concerns?

The institute’s mission is “changing the world for women in technology one woman at a time.” You might also say that overcoming this gender gap means improving IT, corporate America and entrepreneurship one person at a time, since allowing success breeds more of it. Here are some of the ways we can all make that happen:

Be a mentor. Women need mentors, and often those mentors are men, who are three times more likely to be in a leadership position, according to Whitney. A story we did on high-powered women in IT also showed that nearly all of them had male mentors at some time in their career. No mentoring program at your organization? Start one. It needn’t (and shouldn’t) be gender-specific; the point is to get senior people involved in mentoring promising midcareer professionals.

Advocate for a family-friendly company culture. Some companies allow job shares or a split workday so parents can be home when school’s out or there are soccer games. My company, for instance, is very big on flextime, and we have a very generous maternity leave (12 paid weeks of time off). You can bet I work with a lot of smart folks who are also young parents.

Encourage our daughters, nieces and granddaughters to consider the sciences. Just one in four college or graduate science students today is a woman.

Then once they pursue the studies, help them get the skills they need for the workplace. One attendee suggested giving them the book Women Don’t Ask. And in that vein, let’s all tell someone today what we need to succeed, or reach out to a younger colleague with an offer of support. We can make change happen too, one person at a time.